Google Cloud Run
GCP's serverless container service — push a Docker image; Cloud Run scales from 0 to N and bills per request-second.
Launched in 2019 by the same team that built App Engine. Built on Knative under the hood. Supports both HTTP services and background jobs (Cloud Run Jobs). Cold starts often under 1 second thanks to gVisor + Borg-scheduler tricks.
Sweet spot: stateless HTTP services with spiky traffic. Competitors: AWS Lambda (more event-driven), AWS App Runner, Azure Container Apps, Fly.io. Often picked over Lambda because you get the full Docker stack instead of package-size restrictions.